How To Not Work While At Work!

My office desk is covered over with material for the upcoming semester (and my current muffin teaching project). My desk at home is covered over as well, but with other material. Anyone observing my workspaces would assume I must have a paper fetish.

But as the new school year draws near, I'm trying to get a jump on curriculum planning. This year I have a Teacher Buddy. I'm trying to think of a good name for him, because I'm sure he'll surface on the blog regularly. So, advice on that score would be welcome. But because I have a cohort, and I'm the "senior" lead, I'm trying to be responsible by giving him the material he'll need to make his own decisions. Ergo, I have to get done first. I've just reworked the How Not To Fail Out of College sections we have to teach to account for the gutting the administrators did to the program. That was so aggravating it may need its own post, but for the moment, I've wrestled it to the ground. I'm currently working on the First Year Writing prep, because we have 100% new assignments -- well, sort of. They're just changed enough so that the whole syllabus needs to be redone, but not so foreign that I can't use previous techniques. But it feels like I'm doing all new course preparation for everything, which makes me agitated and more prone to surf the internet and waste time blogging.

As I swam through the wave of papers on my desk, I came across the "field notes" paper we were given for the training we had this past May. Instead of important notes about the presentations, my field notes are covered with my own conversations and notes to those around me, a process JP and I have used previously to survive graduate classes. It looks like you're taking diligent notes, when in fact, you're busy making observations like the following:

books = teh awesome!

making fun of Canadians

Category marking number of times "eh" is said (answer: 5)

Who is girl @ end of table???

White Person's Business Voice (four tick marks)

Is that some sort of bacterial infection?!

drawing of cat

stab out my own [picture of eye] (two tick marks)

NONCOMPLIANT (I don't remember why I wrote this, but I assume it was in reference to myself)

There was smarmy-ness during our presentation!!!

Yes, very important observations, I know. But they are a critical way to survive meetings and training sessions. So is blogging, tweeting and general internet surfing when you really just don't want to finish your fall curriculum... So please -- comment and entertain me. I'm bored off my ass right now!

-- DV